Hot Apps hasn't been on Channel 9 for a while, either. What's up with that?

I have to wonder if "long-time members" had to be the ones that were paying members continuously since Live's launch. I got in to the beta the month before launch (so my gamertag turned 10 in October), but that first year, I hadn't turned on "auto-renewal", and there were fewer than 24 hours back in 2003 that I was "silver". It was enough to disqualify me from the "Live is 5ive" freebies five years ago, and no one called me offering me a free Xbox this year.

I'm actually disappointed with the B&N and MS collaboration so far. A Windows 8 app, but no WP8 app? The Windows 8 app isn't all that spectacular, either, in comparison to the Kindle app (I'm a NOOK owner, and live in that ecosystem, so I'm not playing fan boy here). Then the most recent NOOK tablet was still an Android based system. Doesn't seem like much of a collaboration to me.

I find it a bit odd that this video got over ten thousand views and just three comments, maybe something is wrong with the viewer counter?

You and me both! I'm a big metrics guy and it seriously confuses me how there can be that many views and such few star ratings and comments. One of our episodes has 270,000+ views with almost no difference in comments/ratings. I'm pretty sure the analytics are grossly exaggerated.

You and me both! I'm a big metrics guy and it seriously confuses me how there can be that many views and such few star ratings and comments. One of our episodes has 270,000+ views with almost no difference in comments/ratings. I'm pretty sure the analytics are grossly exaggerated.

Thanks for throwing us under the bus Paul The analytics for videos that were on the home page of Channel 9 during Build are incorrect. The issue was that during Build, we changed the home page of Channel 9 to have two experiences. The default one was the live player during the conference, while users could click an X to get at the "classic" Channel 9 page.

As for comments, the total # of comments is always low for online videos. It's not just Channel 9, if you look at a typical YouTube video, the total # of comments is typically less than 1/2 of 1% of the total viewers. And of course, we really don't want to emulate the quality of YouTube comments on Channel 9

Another issue with participation on Channel 9 is that unlike YouTube, Channel 9 is designed to work great offline as niners (including myself), download event videos, shows, training videos, etc. My data is a little old, but I think something like 30% of views were from downloads versus plays on the page.

No maliciousness intended! Didn't mean to ruffle any feathers. Just trying to analyze the data

As for comments, the total # of comments is always low for online videos. It's not just Channel 9, if you look at a typical YouTube video, the total # of comments is typically less than 1/2 of 1% of the total viewers. And of course, we really don't want to emulate the quality of YouTube comments on Channel 9

Another issue with participation on Channel 9 is that unlike YouTube, Channel 9 is designed to work great offline as niners (including myself), download event videos, shows, training videos, etc. My data is a little old, but I think something like 30% of views were from downloads versus plays on the page.

"Low" is a relative term. To figure out what is low you need to compare to industry averages. There will certainly be far fewer people who comment than who watch... and even fewer people who provide meaningful comments that really add to the discussion.

Let's drop the expected response rate to .2% for tech videos like this or this) = 100 comments for a tech YouTube video with 50,000 views

... Channel 9 generally gets 5-25 comments per 50,000 views (including comments from the C9 personalities). If we account for the 30% watching offline then we'd drop YouTube down by 30% to 175 and 70 comments respectively... that would mean that people are 3x to 14x less-likely to comment on C9 than on YouTube.

Also, on YouTube there are more likes/dislikes per video as well through their thumbs up/thumbs down voting... From the this or this links above...

423 votes out of 52,736 views = .8% voting

1,284 votes out of 432,512 views = .3% voting

Compared to Channel 9 where you get maybe 5 or 10 votes out of 50,000 views which would be .02%. This is 15x-40x difference in engagement on C9 compared to tech videos on YouTube.

Just based on this data, I would submit that there is a problem somewhere. Here are some quick thoughts:

1) The averages and baselines (.2% comment and .3% voting) could be off in which case this whole analysis would need to be thrown out the window... and we wouldn't know how C9's engagement compares to the average for online tech videos.

2) The view count may be inflated by more than 30% (my initial quip specifically talking about the 270k video).

3) There is a high amount of "bounce" traffic on C9 compared to YouTube where people don't watch enough of a video to care to leave a comment or vote.

4) The account creation or login process is significantly more difficult so people will not login and therefore cannot comment or vote.

5) There isn't enough incentive to vote/comment to overcome the hurdle of creating an account/logging in.

Again, I'm just looking at the data here and trying to throw out some hypotheses. I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus. I love being a part of this community and truly appreciate the discussions that do happen here. All I am saying is that the data seem suspicious to me and it is either:

1) Inaccurate or inflated in some way

OR

2) If the data are right then that means there is significant room for improvement in engaging with the people who are visiting the site.

-Paul

p.s. Another fun fact: this is probably the longest comment I've ever written on any forum.

@Paul II: I love this type of in depth analysis , but I thought I'd point out that the login issue shouldn't be that much of a hurdle, for two reasons...

The sign-up process on YouTube (I just went through it to check it out) takes a similar amount of time and has a similar number of questions to fill out (including a captcha on both), and

you can comment on Channel 9 without logging in or making an account at all... so no barrier there at all.

This of course doesn't address the underlying question, but just trying to remove one of the theories

These are good points. I just looked at my phrasing for #4... I didn't intend to imply that something is definitely broken with signup/login... I meant that the data indicate there may be some barrier in the initial signup funnel or the perceived barrier in repeatedly logging in. I haven't gone through the signup process in years so I can't comment on how difficult it is.

Login is a different story... one difference that I do see is that with YouTube, I'm always logged in because it's tied to my Google Account and I'm constantly using Gmail. For some reason with Channel 9, I have to re-login with my Microsoft ID a lot. I haven't quite figured out how my credentials expire so frequently. So there may be something there for people who have accounts, but perceive a barrier to login? Or we could eliminate this point all together.

But for your second point... anonymous comments, yeah, it doesn't really get much easier than that for passersby

Here are some more ideas... perhaps add in reputation to incent people to leave quality comments? Or allow people to vote comments up/down for delicious karma? Perhaps do a 60 day trial with a common commenting platform like Disqus or Facebook comments and see if engagement goes up/down?

I held up YouTube as an example of the best possible engagement for video. I just don't think it's a fair comparison to Channel 9. While the stats are slightly out-of-date, YouTube was like 20% of all internet traffic and 60% of video traffic ~2009. Despite how big it is, it still can't get engagement past a fraction of a percent. And I agree, if you compare Channel 9 to YouTube in terms of engagement, we'll always lose.

For a slightly more fair comparison, you can see stats from www.vimeo.com. Now vimeo is again way bigger than us in terms of users, views, etc. Vimeo does allow downloads on most of their content so no need to factor in differences there.

Based on your previous jQuery search, searching on vimeo.com for "jQuery" or jQuery tutorial

You know, it isn't very fair that Paul doesn't get to throw a nine guy at the camera. I wonder if some one might be able to create something that would let him do that? Something with a Kinect and maybe he can control it remotely.

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